Conclusions and future developments

In the last decade, a number of long-term discomfort indices have been proposed in the scientific literature, standards and guidelines, for describing in a concise way the long-term thermal comfort conditions in buildings. Since some of the indices are based on thermal comfort models whilst others derive from rules of thumb, since they are considerably different in their structure and significance and since a systematic collection of those was missing, a hopefully exhaustive review, a contrasting and comparing analysis and a gap analysis of the existing long-term discomfort indices have been carried out and have been presented in this work.